Monkey Kingdom

behind the scenes

Three Years in the Jungle Over 1,000 Camera Days Three F65s and Two F55s Eight Months of Editing

Story by David Heuring Interviews produced by Peter Crithary

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Monkey Kingdom, Disneynature’s latest True Life Adventure, combines narrative storytelling techniques with nature filmmaking to tell the story of Maya, a clever toque macaque who must adapt when her home is overrun by a neighboring troop of monkeys. The film’s cast of characters also includes Kip, Maya’s newborn son; Raja, the troop’s alpha male; and a trio of high status females called The Sisterhood. With voiceover narration by Tina Fey, these diverse personalities interact within the complex social strata of macaque monkeys, and work together to make the transition to a new home.

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Monkey Kingdom

Filming Monkey Kingdom was a unique, daunting undertaking. Director Mark Linfield enlisted veteran wildlife cinematographers Gavin Thurston and Martyn Colbeck, along with a team of other experienced filmmakers. Over the course of almost three years, they filmed in the remote jungles of Sri Lanka using Sony F65 cameras to create stunning imagery. To capture the lives and personalities of the native macaques, the filmmakers worked with scientists and spent months in the field familiarizing themselves with the habits of these fascinating creatures. The crew gathered almost 1000 hours of rushes which were shaped over the course of an eight-month edit.

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Adding to the sense of drama and wonder is the backdrop for the tale: the remains of an ancient civilization that had been abandoned for 500 years before being discovered by British travelers in the early 1800s. The Polonnaruwa area includes spectacular ruins of long-forgotten cities constructed nearly a thousand years ago.

Sri Lanka itself is a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site, and is home to a host of wildlife – mongoose, hornbills, sloth bears, elephants, giant squirrels, monitor lizards, leopards and more than 250 types of birds, to name a few.

Co-director Alastair Fothergill says, “I think one of

Over the course of almost three years, they filmed in the remote jungles of Sri Lanka using Sony F65 cameras to create stunning imagery

the reasons audiences like Disneynature is because these films transport them to new and amazing places. Animals and people cohabitate here and have done so for hundreds of years.�

With temperatures topping 80 degrees F. most days of the year and humidity ranging between 60 and 90 percent, conditions for filmmakers were difficult to say the least. The project entailed more than a thousand camera-days in the field, the most for any Disneynature feature film so far.

Monkey Kingdom is the eighth film by Disneynature, the independent film label of

Walt Disney Studios. Five of the top six highest overall grossing feature-length nature films to date came out under the Disneynature label.

Monkey Kingdom was released in cinemas in North America to coincide with Earth Day. A portion of box office receipts are being donated to Conservation International.

In the following first-person accounts, key filmmakers Linfield, Thurston and Colbeck recall the persistence and ingenuity required to bring the tale to the screen, and reveal the thought processes behind their technical and artistic choices.

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Producer, writer and director Mark Linfield trained as a zoologist and began his career in 1991 with a documentary about gorillas for the BBC, but he is best known for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit as a producer and director on the television series Planet Earth and as writer and co-director of the associated feature film Earth. His other credits include Frozen Planet, the follow-up series to Planet Earth; Chimpanzee, a Disneynature feature film; The Temple Troop; Orangutans: The High Society; Triumph of Life; David Attenborough’s The Life of Mammals; Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle and many others.

The idea for Monkey Kingdom actually came from a film that I made 18 years ago with Gavin at the same location, which we shot on Super 16 film. We had returned a couple of times since, so we knew what was possible. The location seemed to have all the potential for a big screen movie with fascinating animals that were approachable, in a cinematic setting of ancient temples covered by jungle.

We cut a pitch tape together for Disney from our previous visits, and they loved it. I immediately knew I wanted Martyn and Gavin as the principal cinematographers – both are at the top of their field photographically and both also have huge experience working with primates, which gives them an uncanny ability to predict behavior. Plus, of course, we are all friends – it’s critical that you get on with someone in our genre, because you end up spending a lot of time together!

Gavin Thurston 5

Martyn Colbeck

I immediately knew I wanted Martyn and Gavin as the principal cinematographers – both are at the top of their field photographically 6

As usual with Disney, we could choose our own equipment based on the needs of the project. We try to inherit gear from our previous movies, but in this case had a new opportunity. Our previous film for Disney had been shot on a 2/3" camera, because we’d needed a lightweight set-up and the extra “reach” that a smaller sensor gives you when filming distant animals. These qualities were less important this time as the monkeys were relatively approachable, and carrying gear at this location would be easier compared to the last.

Shooting with a s35mm sensor would have significant advantages on this occasion. We wanted to isolate our monkey subjects from the cluttered forest background, which is easier to do with a larger sensor, and we also wanted the other advances that had come with single large CMOS sensors, like high sensitivity, low noise, wide dynamic range, higher frame rates and more resolution. You really have to move to large single sensor cameras to get this suite of qualities.

The F65 had come out only shortly before Monkey Kingdom and was on our list to consider even though it had quickly gained a reputation for being a behemoth with difficult data management.

Several other s35mm digital cinema cameras were becoming popular with wildlife filmmakers, but we found them lacking in a number of ways. Either you needed to use a larger-than-Super 35 area of the sensor to get good image quality, which would restrict our lensing too much, or they didn’t have built-in ND filters, which are really helpful for our genre, or they are even heavier than the F65, or lacking in other ways. We were also keen to shoot raw in camera and the F65 was designed with this in mind. One thing we found very hard to argue with in our tests was the image quality, but I’ll come back to that.

Once we committed to the F65, we quickly began to appreciate other “little” details which proved very important 7

There’s no doubt the F65 is heavy, but once we built up the competing camera systems with the extras we needed and stripped off the bits from the F65 that we didn’t, the weight difference largely vanished. Gavin managed to shave a surprising amount of weight off the F65 by

designing a lighter handle and plate system and this made a big difference.

Despite this I was still concerned that the total weight of a camera with a 10x zoom (our standard configuration) would make us less reactive in the forest and cause us to miss valuable shots. We all wanted fabulous-looking pictures on the big screen, but how much missed material could we accept as collateral damage? This question was in the front of our minds on the first shoot, so we took a Sony 9000 camera with a 2/3" sensor as well as the F65 so we could compare the productivity and the image quality of the two systems. After we used both for a few weeks, the 9000 was left in its case.

Sure, the F65 was heavier, but the 9000 was struggling to cope with the dynamic range in many scenes, and the shallow depth of focus from the F65’s larger sensor proved an even greater advantage than we had anticipated. Once we committed to the F65, we quickly began to appreciate other “little” details which proved very important. The focus tool was great and the exposure tools were brilliant – there is a feature where pixels that are clipped on the sensor show up as red in the viewfinder, and this operates in your normal filming mode – you don’t have to go in to false color or anything. That makes setting exposure by eye brilliantly quick and intuitive: put a REC 709 LUT in the viewfinder and expose to make the midtones look correct. If the highlights look too bright – as they often will with such a LUT – ignore them unless you see red pixels showing in your composition. This avoids the temptation to underexpose, which often happens when using 709 M-LUTs. The advantage of this system is the ability to see which pixels are clipping, which means that if red is on the specular highlight of a shiny leaf cuticle you might ignore it, but if you see it on monkey fur you will want to adjust your exposure.

The camera team didn’t use waveform monitors but their exposures were excellent and consistent throughout the production. As I write, no other camera has this system including the F55.

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On the subject of ND, we had four increments in addition to “clear,” which was great for making fast, subtle adjustments to depth of focus. By default the F65’s weakest ND filter was 3 stops which was too big a jump from ‘clear’ and the heavier NDs were so strong they were rarely needed, so we had our cameras modified by Sony to give more useful increments. This helped Gavin and Martyn to constantly fine tune the degree of separation between subject and background. We couldn’t have done this with a matte box and filter tray system – it would have been far too slow and it would have been a 9

nightmare keeping the filters clean in the dusty conditions. On the subject of dust, the only significant issue we had with our F65s during the whole production was dust and grime building up on the internal NDs and air glass surfaces of the sensor array – presumably because this part of the cameras is not fully sealed. This is something I would like to see improved if the F65 is ever updated.

Many people assume we went with the F65 because of the quality of its 4K image, but that wasn’t the case. When we started this project

Monkey Kingdom

In our genre “reach out and touch” detail is what most people seek because it’s immersive and the best way to transport people to the location

three years ago, we suspected that 4K would be more established in the cinema, so we wanted to maintain the option of a 4K release.

But the camera had a significant edge over its rivals for a 2K delivery. Not only did it have the right combination of operation features I mentioned but, in our tests, you could clearly see the advantages of oversampling in the 2K image. Pictures had such cleanly defined high frequency detail which stayed high in contrast until the display ran out of pixels. This was a look we wanted. In our genre “reach out and touch” detail is what most people seek because it’s

immersive and the best way to transport people to the location. In addition, shooting 4K for 2K gives you the ability to reframe shots. Personally, I prefer to use this as a “get out of jail free” card rather than a production technique, but the fact that the F65 has an especially detailed 4K image, with close to 4K resolution in every color channel, and with full 4K on the green channel, means you can push in on the image that much more compared to other 4K cameras.

We only reframed four or five shots on Monkey Kingdom, but when we did do it the image held up brilliantly well.

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Monkey Kingdom

How does one go about directing a film like Monkey Kingdom? After all, the actors don’t read scripts or hit their marks and some days your lead doesn’t even turn up! Part of the director’s role is to decide what to focus on. It’s helping to recognize what the story is and working out with your team the best way to capture it, taking in to account the various limitations we have. After all, unlike a Hollywood live action film, we have no studio, no CGI and no possibility of our actors doing anything that they weren’t going to do anyway!

It’s especially important to stay focused. In a troop of 50 monkeys some of them will always be doing something interesting, but all the time you are filming incidental material you could be missing something important to your story. As the story unfolds you must also consider what supporting material you need, and how to allocate your resources. As long as you keep assessing the rushes as you go and you are clear which of the emerging stories are key, you can keep the camera effort focused. It’s a very collaborative process, and Jeff Wilson my assistant director, Martyn, Gavin and I would spend a lot of time discussing these things.

On this film we knew the theme of our story before we started. The most interesting thing about macaques is that they live in an incredibly class-driven society where a monkey’s position in life is largely based on the position of its parents, especially for females. If you were born at the bottom of the pile then nothing comes easy to you. Just to raise an infant and feed yourself, you have to be smart and resourceful and beat the system. So we knew our story would follow a low ranking female as she tried to make the most of a bad start in life. Of course we didn’t know exactly what would happen to our star during the course of the production. That’s serendipity. But we knew that on a daily basis, we would be primarily focusing on her and the things that were impacting her life and her struggle, whether it was a male monkey that was flirting with her, or a high-ranking female that was proving to be an obstacle.

So while we didn’t have a crystal ball, we had a filming plan and we knew what we were looking for. What you really want to avoid is sitting in the middle of a group of monkeys shooting anything that looks pretty. Do that and you’ll be in an edit suite three years later wading through hundreds of hours of material but without the shots you need to tell the story. The best nature films are made from real stories, covered with care and focus as they develop.

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The best nature films are made from real stories, covered with care and focus as they develop

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Monkey Kingdom

We filmed for more than 1,000 cameradays and probably averaged a terabyte a day. That’s almost a petabyte of rushes!

Initially it was difficult to reduce the amount we shot because monkeys are hard to predict and the F65 has no preroll (something that would have been helpful). We didn’t fancy hanging on to that many rushes, not only because of storage costs but because it can make it hard to “see the forest through the trees.” Therefore we developed quite an unusual postproduction route. We would bring our raw rushes back from the field and copy them to LTO5 tapes and a 20TB Thunderbolt drive configured RAID 5. We then used YoYotta to make DNx proxies at DNx 115 – 1920 x 1080.

Then I, or Jeff Wilson, would make selects from the proxies, discounting material either for technical reasons, or because it was similar material we already had but less good. The selects timeline would rarely be more than 40% of what we’d shot that day and often far less. Then we’d generate an EDL from the selects and use this to data-conform the raw clips to generate a new, shorter set of raw masters. These were identical in image quality as no transcoding had taken place. The raw MXF clips are just shortened, then closed, so the files remain valid. Next we would make new proxies from the new raws to ensure all the file names of the masters and proxies matched and because we felt more comfortable with the proxies having been made from the raw files. This whole process, as well as the archiving and the final conform pull, was managed through YoYotta software by our technical manager, Dan Clamp, who also helped design the workflow and who was in regular contact with YoYotta’s Martin Greenwood. Martin was very responsive and would regularly write new code to help us achieve what we needed.

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We used Avid for our offline, but first we needed a system to find the shots we wanted. Jeff Wilson catalogued the material in CatDv using multiple tags so we could search for material based on the location, monkey character, any secondary characters in the composition, behavior, light, season and so on. During the edit we could then filter using any combination of these fields and drag the result in to Avid which would build a clip reel from the shots. It worked brilliantly and it’s hard to imagine how the edit would have worked had we not made this initial investment in detailed logging.

Once we had picture locked, Dan restored all the “ins” from the LTO tapes and dataconformed them to length. The raw MXF files were then copied on to a Baselight timeline for grading. The conform and audience screening preview grade were done at Films@59 in Bristol, and the final grade at Technicolor in London with colorist Peter Doyle. The preview grade was an opportunity to try different grading workflows; we had anticipated using ACES but the latest version at the start of 2015 did not work well with the subject matter and we abandoned this approach quite quickly. We found that while grading in the wide ACES space was great for avoiding color clipping, the final RRT stage had a rather aggressive “print look” tone curve which would crunch the shadows and introduce too much tonal compression in to the highlights and there was no easy way of separating the tone curve from the color conversion.

In the end, Peter decoded the Sony raw files as S-log 3, P3- DCI and graded them directly without a LUT in a P3 Native White work space, monitoring in XYZ on the projector. In this way Peter had full control of the tone curve and by viewing in XYZ we could see exactly how the final DCP would look.

YoYotta Systems: Managing 1 Petabyte of information YoYotta was a key contributor to the success of the Monkey Kingdom shoot, providing workflow support in production and in post. Each location employed two YoYotta systems – one a MacBook Pro®, the other a MacPro. The LTFS archive used dual Quantum LTO tape drives. YoYottaID software was used to create 750 LTO5 tapes of original footage. YoDailies software transcoded all the material to DNxHD 115 for Avid. The Avid was used to select cutdown sequences to reduce the takes to 1/2 to 2/3 of the original acquisition. YoDailies was then used to create new 4K raw files to match the trimmed footage.

Then YoYottaID was used again to create around 400 LTO5 tapes x 2 (master and safety copies) using LTFS tape format.

These LTO tapes then went back to Bristol for grading and editing.

During the course of the shoot, YoYotta’s staff often wrote software upgrades to address the evolving needs of production, usually additional features or glitch fixes.

Emailed updates could reach the filmmakers in Sri Lanka overnight and be incorporated into the workflow the next day.

An average of ninety minutes of footage per day in F65 4K raw SQ resulted in approximately 1 petabyte of information.

“YoYotta was very ‘on the ball,’” says cinematographer Gavin Thurston.

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Monkey Kingdom

We wanted the images to have as much ‘pop’ as possible – ideally the audience would feel like they were standing in Sri Lanka looking through a pane of glass. Firstly this meant maximizing microcontrast and detail without the images looking ‘edgy’ so we had Reliance media in

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Burbank do an image enhancement pass, the media from this formed a second layer in the Baselight which could be blended with the original. This layer was usually applied regionally to the monkeys faces. Then we had to use the limited dynamic range of the current DCI spec to

We wanted the images to have as much ‘pop’ as possible – ideally the audience would feel like they were standing in Sri Lanka looking through a pane of glass best effect. For Peter, this meant a lot of careful tweaking of the tone curve, often on a shot-byshot basis – especially at the top end of the range to highlight detail. Some of our material really did have detail spanning 13 stops and squeezing that in to the 5.5 or 6 stops of a standard theatre screen

requires tonal compression somewhere. Choosing where to squeeze was a large part of the grade. I guess Monkey Kingdom would have been easier to grade for HDR where we could have just shown the tones available without having to work so hard to compress them in a graceful manor.

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Monkey Kingdom

There’s a lot of discussion about high resolution versus high dynamic range, the subtext being that you must choose between the two when designing a camera. For a given sensor size, higher resolution cameras have smaller pixels and so theoretically less dynamic range, but the F65 has made me question the need to sacrifice resolution to achieve an HDRready image. On Monkey Kingdom it was very rare to find a scene with contrast that couldn’t be captured 17

with the dynamic range of the F65, and the smaller pixels didn’t give us significant noise issues either.

Perhaps if the F65 had fewer, larger pixels, Sony could have given it even more dynamic range, but an extra stop might have helped on one shot in three hundred in our filming environment whereas the extra resolution was apparent in almost every frame.

The issue is perhaps more about media distribution where limitations in bandwidth make it harder to

“have it all,” but from an image capture standpoint we were very happy with the balance between dynamic range and resolution offered by the F65.

I genuinely think the F65 is a very underrated camera.

Why hasn’t it been more widely adopted? I wish it were lighter and less power hungry, but in our tests three years ago the Alexa was equally challenging in these departments. However, the F65 got off to a

very bad start with workflow and data management.

Our first card reader was a big, slow ethernet contraption which was awful; when the SRD1 USB 3.0 card reader came out, it transformed the F65 workflow but, by then, DITs were telling productions not to use the camera and the damage was done.

I don’t think the F65 ever quite recovered from this which is a shame.

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Gavin Thurston’s first camera was a 12-shot Kodak Brownie lent by his aunt. A photograph he took of an orca struck a chord that still resonates today when he sees his images are projected on giant screens in cinemas. Today, his resume includes more than two dozen high profile credits. In 1996 he shared an Emmy for cinematography on The Private Life of Plants, and his work in Madagascar, Congo, and Human Planet has been recognized with shared Emmy nominations. He devoted two and a half years to shooting Monkey Kingdom, sharing cinematography duties with Martyn Colbeck and others. What follows are his recollections of the endeavor, and a look back at his early career.

I shoot all genres really, but I suppose my passion is with wildlife. I’m equally as passionate on the camera side of things and capturing the image. One thing about filming wildlife that has maintained my passion is that it’s not just about seeing the animals and being in wild places – it’s the creative freedom. If you work on drama productions you have less freedom, you’re in bigger teams and crew have narrower more defined roles. With wildlife, the teams tend to be very small. Often, you’re on your own. There’s nobody over your shoulder saying, “Get this wide shot,” or “Get this close-up.” You’ve got to make snap decisions because you don’t know what the animal’s going to do. You can’t have somebody saying, “Oh, he’s walking left. Can you get ahead and follow it when it comes into frame?” It’s already gone.

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Mark has an amazing eye for detail and has, in my opinion, singlehandedly pushed the quality of natural history filmmaking to what it is 21

Monkey Kingdom

On Monkey Kingdom, there were times when it was just me and the assistant and the monkey researchers. Then there were other times when we had Mark directing and Jeff Wilson assisting as well.

Sometimes they’ll use a director’s monitor, but more often than not, they’re watching the behavior and the characters. Actually, they’re helping you stay with the character because there are times when you’ve got to pick. Obviously, for Monkey Kingdom, we were mostly following Maya. Sometimes, you let her leave the frame, and by the time you’ve picked the camera up and run on ahead, you’ve lost her in the undergrowth or in the forest. It’s really handy then to have somebody there who’s following the animal, who can point her out and say what she’s doing and whether it’s relevant to the story or not.

Mark Linfield and I have worked together for years, and over that time, our partnership has grown. We’ve talked over the years about how great it would be to go back to Sri Lanka and make a film with better knowledge and experience and cameras and camera techniques – to really do justice to this wonderful subject. Mark kept that in the back of his mind. He worked on the story and convinced Disneynature to commission the film. Mark very kindly came to me and asked me if I’d like to work on it.

Mark has an amazing eye for detail and has, in my opinion, singlehandedly pushed the quality of natural history filmmaking to what it is. His attention to detail is so fine it occasionally is annoying. But ultimately, we all have to give him credit. As a wildlife cinematographer I would say that some of the images we produce with very small production teams in the field are easily as good as what you’ll see from big budget theatrical productions. I’m hoping that people think that Monkey Kingdom does make the grade as a theatrical release.

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But he told me that there was a new camera out, the Sony F65, and that it was the best thing going, absolutely – way ahead of anything else. I said, “If that’s the best camera, then we should be filming on it” 23

Monkey Kingdom

Mark is very “on the ball” with the latest technology. Very early on, he was asking what I thought we should shoot Monkey Kingdom on. Chimpanzee had been shot on the Panasonic 3700, which is HD. At the time, for that particular film, it was the best camera for working in the forest. But he told me that there was a new camera out, the Sony F65, and that it was the best thing going, absolutely – way ahead of anything else. I said, “If that’s the best camera, then we should be filming on it.” I’d never even seen the camera. I had seen some of the specs, but I’d never seen it in the flesh.

Wildlife productions take around three years from start to finish and camera quality can come a long way in that time. I felt it important to be starting with the best.

Mark noted that the F65 was big and heavy.

I went up to BVE, the British version of NAB, held in London. I found the Sony stand, and there on a heavy-duty Ronford tripod was a fully built-up F65 – raw recorder, monitor, 15mm bars, 19mm bars, 3-stage matte box, follow focus, the whole shebang. I went over and I asked if I could pick it up.

It was heavy, but not as heavy as say a 35mm film camera was. I also knew that we did not have to build it up it like that for the forest. We could lose a lot of the bars.

Straightaway, I was thinking that if this is the best camera for what I want to do, let’s just make it work. People need to bolt all the extras on because the tools help with studio production – handling the camera, sending pictures to directors and ADs, linking sound in and God knows what else. But we wanted to be able to slim it down to the most efficient thing. I was going to have to carry this for 270 days through jungle. I didn’t want to be carrying anything extraneous.

Mark did some tests. Working with the raw files, we were concerned about the amount of data we might shoot. But the camera also has the option of raw SQ and Lite, and

if necessary, we could go down to Lite. The picture was better than anything else out there, and the lovely thing about the F65 is its ability to render the greens. The color depth, generally, is amazing. To have 16-bit raw color is extraordinary, but having two green channels means that you get the beautiful richness of greens. Apart from the dry season, most of what we were going to be filming would have perhaps 80% green in the frame. We thought it would be amazing to be able to render those as trueto-life as possible. Many cameras struggle with that.

For the first location shoot we decided to do a trial. Straightaway, I loved the F65.

The viewfinder was amazing. That was the older LCD viewfinder as well – this was a couple years ago, before the OLED – but working with a color viewfinder was, for me, quite new. Everything I’d done before that was with a black and white viewfinder.

Back in the days of film, you had an optical link between your eye and the animal. It was like watching something down a telescope and there was a real connection. You’re actually seeing the real optical image on ground glass off a mirror. Shooting on video, the viewfinders were historically black and white because that gave you a sharper image to focus.

But you’re one step removed then from the animals. In terms of trying to predict behavior and being totally in tune with the animal, the black and white viewfinder for me was always like watching it on television rather than watching it for real down an optical viewfinder. Filming in color with the F65, that connection was coming back. You’ve still got numbers and other display in the viewfinder, which can remind you that you’re watching an image rather than the real thing. But color was certainly a big step.

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So after that first shoot in Sri Lanka I personally favored the F65. It was like using a film camera. We had variable frame rates. This is going back a few firmware versions now, but I think we had 1 to 60 frames, and a mechanical shutter, which made a difference. We did tests with and without it, and it did make the movements of animals and so on cleaner. So for me it was like going back to film.

We then looked at how we could slim the F65 down. I took it apart, but not completely, and talking through it with an engineer, we were able to shave 3.8 kilos (8.3lbs) off the weight. For instance, between the raw recorder and the V-Loc battery plate, there’s a solid aluminum plate, which is a spacer. I said, “Ideally, all you need is four washers to get the spacing. Why don’t we machine this plate down?” We lost the 15mm bars on top, which are for follow-focus and for clamping accessories. With the help of engineers Dave Evans and his son Chris in Bristol, we totally 25

redesigned the handle on the top, and the baseplate to save weight. In the end, the camera/ lens/tripods combo was about 29 kilos (63lbs).

As a result, we were able to shoot with the best camera, in my opinion, without doing our backs and knees and hips in. Considering that I’m doing maybe 200 repetitions each day with the camera and lens, plus Ronford 2004 head and legs – picking it up, moving it forward, putting it down, picking it up again etc. – to shave 3.8 kilos (8.3lbs) off those repetitions was, at my age, a godsend. It’s probably given me another five years on my hips and knees.

So it was effort well spent.

For this project, Martyn and I both had assistant cameramen. Robbie Garbutt was assisting me and Luke Hazel was assisting Martyn, and the idea was that we’d have a quick release plate to split camera and tripod. We’d run ahead of the monkeys, put it back together and so on. But actually, in the end,

Monkey Kingdom

with the camera slimmed down to bare minimum I was able to manhandle the camera and tripod as one, and save a lot of time. You save probably five or ten seconds each time, and when you’re filming behavior and things are happening, those seconds count.

On Monkey Kingdom, we chose three Canon lenses, the 15.5-47mm, the 30-300mm 2.95 – that was the lens that was on probably 80% of the time – and also a Canon 500 F4, for which we had the back end modified so that it worked with the PL mount. True Lens Services in the U.K. does a modification to convert those long Canon lenses to PL mount with manual iris control. All those lenses easily stand up to delivering a 4K image for the F65 sensor. We have also a 1.4 times Canon converter, for the long lens. I loved the combination of those lenses so much that I bought one of each.

The F65 has useful tools to help with focus and exposure. Firstly there is 2x/4x zoom. Focus for the big screen is critical and the focus assist essential to achieve that. We had the camera

adapted so that we could run a cable to the pan handle to be able to control that function from an assignable button along with record start/stop.

Many cinematographers use color peaking, but I find it distracting. When the reds start jumping out on edges, it detracts from the framing, so I don’t use it. I just use the plain/white peaking.

In certain situations though, I can see that color peaking could be really useful. We discovered in testing that it’s very critical where you set that peaking. It’s easy to crank it to 50% or 70% where it’s very easy to focus on things, but you have to be careful – if that band of peaking is actually wider than the critical focus, the camera can cheat you into thinking something’s in focus when it isn’t. I think Martyn’s level was slightly higher than mine. I think I had the peaking set at 30 and Martyn was about 34 or 35. There might be times when you would tweak that. If you were filming on a really low contrast day, you might cheat it by +4 or 5%. But generally I’m trying to keep the peaking on the absolute minimum. The nice thing is that you can set these cameras to suit your own eye and preference to get accurate results.

“I personally favored the F65.

It was like using a film camera”

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I also used the high key/low key feature when the contrast was high just to double check exposure latitude. I was always seeing detail in fully sunlit clouds, and yet I was able to still see into the shadows without significant noise coming into the blacks. I’m sure Mark’s worked his trickery with those raw files and the grade, but I think generally you’ve got amazing dynamic range without those horrible electronic white highlights, without too much noise in the shadows and blacks.

There’s one scene in the film where the monkeys get driven out of their patch and into town. They’re looking for somewhere to settle. They get to spend the night up the “tallest tree in the concrete jungle.”

I don’t want to spoil it for anybody who hasn’t seen the film, but they sleep right in the middle of a busy town. There happens to be a very noisy festival on that night and we shot that festival in actuality.

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We stayed at 800 ISO. There was a big procession at night, and there were flames and candles and incandescent lighting and car lights and lights from the shops, and obviously, a lot of black space too in there. We weren’t lighting this at all. I thought the images looked astounding. I haven’t seen them fully graded, but straight out of the camera, they were amazingly clean images. The camera handled it very, very well.

In Monkey Kingdom there’s an underwater sequence.

Obviously, putting an F65 into a housing would be expensive. Plus there weren’t any off-the-shelf housings available. Also, it’s quite risky to put such a camera underwater with a whole lot of marauding monkeys, including myself. So we chose the F55 for the underwater filming. It’s much more compact.

Where the monkeys swim isn’t particularly deep, so we would also have been restricted using the

F65 just because of the size of it.

There’s a lot of particulate matter in the water, and it’s a different sort of atmospheric feel. Mark was convinced that we’d get away with the quality change between the cameras, and I think the F55 held up very well. So we used two F55s, one in a Gates housing and one in a bespoke carbon fiber housing.

The carbon fiber housing was used remotely with zoom, focus and record start/stop and remote viewing on a cable. I operated the Gates housing underwater using a mask and snorkel. The monkeys were more tolerant of the remote setup but I was able to put some movement into some of the shots for drama.

We chose the F55 for the underwater filming 28

Monkey Kingdom

One other situation where the F55 was used: there’s a sequence with the monkeys on their home rock, where they live. They’re exploring around the rock and looking in nooks and crannies. The youngsters are being cheeky, and there’s a little scene there where they interact with a mongoose, which goes in a hole. There’s no way we could get the F65 inside the holes that the monkeys go in so, again, that was another great use for the F55. We could put the camera down these holes and monitor it remotely and get the shots of the monkeys peering in through the gaps. The ‘Gulos’, the German camera team who shot the sloth bear footage, adapted a Sony F55 for filming inside the caves, purely because of the size. I defy anyone to actually see the difference.

You’re putting the camera in a different environment.

Underwater, you’ve got a different medium, and likewise in a cave you’ve got different atmospherics.

So I think you easily get away with intercutting the images. You might notice the difference on big wide shots with lots of fine detail, but actually the F55 holds up very well.

Incidentally, I’ve just used the F55 to shoot an online project for Giorgio Armani, for their Frames of Life campaign. It’s graded black and white, but I’m very pleased with the images. They look beautifully filmic.

Having been in the industry a long time and having shot mostly for television, I was determined to use Monkey Kingdom as an opportunity to use grip equipment and motion control and various ways of moving the camera in a very controlled manner to produce theatrical images like those we’re used to seeing on much bigger Hollywood movies. I really wanted it to look like something shot to cinema for theater rather than for television, so I knew we really had to up our game. The first thing was obviously to go with the best camera, the best glass, the best tripods, the best equipment. Top Teks was the main rental house, but we also took lightweight grip equipment from Moving Picture Hire. There were usually just two or three of us, and we couldn’t be lugging traditional heavyweight tracks and dollies through the forest. We needed something lightweight and sturdy that would stand up to the 29

rigours of shooting for the big screen. We also took motion control. It’s one thing if you’ve got a grip pushing you on a dolly – you can do repeat views accurately because they’re watching their marks on the ground. But we couldn’t always have an extra person there. So we used motion control drives to be able to get accurate repeat moves and smooth imagery for the big screen.

I’m very pleased to see that a lot of those shots have made it in – drifting forward through leaves and moving with the monkeys on their journey. The thing I’m proudest of is that a lot of those shots actually look very cinematic, and I don’t think anyone will argue with that. It’s quite nice to think that two or three people can hike out with an F65 kit with some grip equipment and actually produce theatricalquality images.

The thing I’m proudest of is that a lot of those shots actually look very cinematic 30

Having the versatility to go to 120 frames on the F65 was great, particularly for the stuff around water with the monkeys mucking around 31

Monkey Kingdom

One thing that was particularly good with the F65, and which got better and better, was the wi-fi connectivity.

Robbie, who was assisting me, had the iPad with the F65 app on it. I’d be filming, and as I was going to go for a close-up or needed more light or I was changing frame rate, and I could call out those things, and he would tap them in on the iPad. As soon as I cut the camera, he could implement those changes. I wouldn’t have to take my eye from the viewfinder and I could hit the record button again at the new frame rate or with the ND changed.

Instead of requiring the assistant’s hands to physically be on the camera, the ability to be 10 feet and possibly 20 feet back so as not to spook the monkeys or other wildlife, and to implement those changes on the camera remotely, was really invaluable in many situations.

Also, you’re actually able to get a wi-fi picture beamed onto the iPad with a slight delay. So he’d be able to see what shot I’m on – a wide shot for example. Then I’d go to a mid-shot. Then I’d go to a close shot. And as an assistant, he’d then read that I might want to change to the 500 mm lens, He could then grab it and have it ready so we could change the lenses quickly instead of me having to say something. He could read what was coming next. Having it all built into the iPad app was really clever and very useful.

Having the versatility to go to 120 frames on the F65 was great, particularly for the stuff around water with the monkeys mucking around and making these heroic leaps from 30 feet up in the trees into the water. I think 120 frames is a good frame rate. That’s how I worked for years on the Arriflex HSR16. That went to 150 frames, and maybe as the computers and the cameras get faster and the processing power gets faster, they can tweak it up to 150. But 120, for what we were doing, was adequate.

We used the mechanical shutter for up to 60 frames with the F65, and we were using a 180 degree shutter so as to mimic the look we’re used to seeing with film cameras.

We didn’t narrow the shutter angle at all. If we wanted to dump light, we’d use the built-in NDs or filters on the front. I’m not a big fan of the narrow shutter angle and the high, short shutter speeds, purely because I think it makes the pictures look very edgy. You could use that as a tool if you wanted the audience to feel on edge, but personally I’m not a fan of that look at all.

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Monkey Kingdom

Regarding exposure, we stuck it on 800 ISO for the whole thing.

We never, ever pushed it. Shooting raw, you can crank the ISO to 1600 or 2000 and it looks great in the viewfinder, but all it means is your raw files are less exposed. So we shot everything at 800 ISO and that was to get the cleanest image for the grade, and for the big screen.

We were constantly changing ND depending on whether the monkeys were in the shade or the full sun, switching between no ND, .3, .6, .9 and occasionally 1.2. It was really useful to be able to dial those NDs in really quickly. So if you went to a wider shot, you might want to open up a bit more to control the depth of field. If you went for a longer lens shot, you might want to lose some ND so you could stop down a stop or two to be able to at least have a chance of keeping the face in focus. Another adaptation we had done on the F65: we had the filter wheels changed. For us, the gap of the NDs was too great. So we had them changed to a .3, a .6, a .9 and a 1.2. Working in the forest, especially at 800 ISO, seemed to be the best combination, rather than what the cameras came with. On feature films where faster glass is being used, the combination that the F65 comes with might be more useful.

We had six 512-gigabyte cards and two 256-gigabyte cards.

There was talk earlier on in the production that Sony would bring us a terabyte card, but we thought it was wise not to put all our eggs in one basket. Out in the field, you’re carrying everything with you in a couple of rucksacks.

There were a few days when we’d shoot all six cards – that’s three terabytes – in the morning. Robbie had his work cut out downloading all that. We didn’t have a separate DIT manager, so assistants Robbie Garbutt or Luke Hazel handled that. I wasn’t heavily involved in the data, thank goodness. The days were long enough already. If there were software glitches or features we needed, the guys from YoYotta could often write something overnight and email it through. Robbie would put it into the software and we’d have another feature, or cure a glitch.

Initially, we were shooting F65 raw-SQ until Mark got a bit twitchy about the data, and we went to raw Lite for a short while. Over the next few months the shooting volume went down a bit as the story became more honed, we were more focused on the characters we were following, and the data management became smoother and more efficient, so we switched back to raw-SQ. The data management became very streamlined and it wasn’t a scary prospect to be able to keep on top of it.

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The data management became very streamlined and it wasn’t a scary prospect to be able to keep on top of it 34

Monkey Kingdom

Monkey Kingdom was a great production to work on. Working in Sri Lanka was fantastic. The people were fantastic. The food was fantastic. And then on the camera side of things, I personally really enjoyed working with the F65. There were times when I cursed it. There were times when I did think it was too heavy – when you’re chasing after monkeys through a jungle in 30°C (86°F) degree heat plus humidity. But I think the pictures really speak for themselves on the big screen.

The monkeys are like extended family to me now, 35

when I go back it’s like meeting old relatives, their personalties don’t change but they pick up more wrinkles as time passes. Of course some of the troop have died during the production, but it’s a close knit society and the fact that they look after each other seems to help them live longer. And I think that’s one of the messages of the film. You’ll see that they do help each other. And yes, there are squabbles just like in a soap opera. But you’ll see that they’re stronger as a team than they would be as individuals.

I was on the project for about two and a half years, a total of 320 days on the production including travel days. I spent about 280 camera days in the field with the monkeys. Martyn and I were sort of tag-teaming. I’d be out for six weeks, then Martyn would arrive and overlap by a day. We could talk about which stories were developing, which characters were doing what. He would then stay for eight or more weeks. Martyn is more hardcore than me and he tended to do longer shoots. I couldn’t sustain that level for eight weeks straight,

because you’re working every day, 12-hour days.

Martyn has amazing stamina. Several cameramen contributed to Monkey Kingdom – Warrick Sloss, Mark Smith, Oliver Goeztl, Ivo Norenberg, Simon Niblett, Matt Aeberhard and Barrie Britton. Each had their specialty, shooting different bits around the main story, with the same kit so there is great continuity of look across the film.

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Martyn Colbeck became interested in the artistic potential of black & white still photography while earning a biological sciences degree. He began working for the BBC in 1985, and since then, his c.v. has grown to include dozens of wildlife documentary projects including Wild Africa: Mountains; Chimpanzee; The Trials of Life and Planet Earth, for which he shared an Emmy for best cinematography for nonfiction programming.

I’ve worked with a massive range of cameras over the course of my career. In the 1980s, we were shooting on Arriflex 16SRs. We used Panasonic VariCams on Planet Earth, the first BBC HD production – it was the only variable speed HD camera at that time. We shot Chimpanzee on the Panasonic VariCam 3700, primarily because I was walking about 22 kilometers a day carrying equipment, and we needed something relatively light that still offered variable speed. Monkey Kingdom was the first time I used a Sony camera.

Shooting on the Sony F65 was a revelation.

Gavin, Mark and I all sat looking at the rushes with our mouths open. We just couldn’t believe the image quality. I think we all felt the same way at the same time.

I’ve worked a lot with Mark over the years.

We have done a lot of primate filming together all over the world, so it seemed like an obvious combination to get both of us to shoot Monkey Kingdom.

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Monkey Kingdom

Monkey Kingdom was the first time I used a Sony camera.

Shooting on the Sony F65 was a revelation. Gavin, Mark and I all sat looking at the rushes with our mouths open. We just couldn’t believe the image quality. I think we all felt the same way at the same time.

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Sometimes the monkeys would literally come up and sit down beside you – they were that comfortable with humans 39

Monkey Kingdom

When it came to choosing the camera, there were several issues. Because of its size, the F65 is not an obvious camera for use on wildlife films where you’re following fastmoving monkeys through dense forests. But luckily these monkeys don’t hold massive territories so we realized we were going to be traveling relatively short distances. When we saw the image quality the F65 could deliver, we decided that the negative side – having to carry a relatively bulky camera – was outweighed by the image quality, the dynamic range, and the resolution that we were going to get for the big screen.

With Monkey Kingdom, we were lucky. A long-term project has been studying these monkeys for 40 years, and so they were very well habituated. Basically, scientists have been looking at them so long that they are totally used to people. That was a massive advantage. You’re starting off with monkeys that you don’t have to habituate. They are tolerant of your presence. Secondly, these animals all have a history. The scientists know who their mothers are, their fathers.

They know their paternal lines. There’s a huge advantage in knowing the characters.

Sometimes the monkeys would literally come up and sit down beside you – they were that comfortable with humans. We always wore the same clothes every day, so they knew exactly who we were. It’s remarkable.

When you have a relationship with an animal like that, it’s fantastic, and what you realize is that because they’re so habituated you’re not affecting their behavior. You are documenting and witnessing what would happen if you weren’t there. If you’ve got unhabituated primates, they’ve got half an eye on you all the time, so they’re not really behaving naturally, but with this group, you know that the dynamics are what would happen naturally.

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Monkey Kingdom

Nevertheless, you’re still having to follow them wherever they go. You can’t control what they’re doing. They’re doing their own thing, and you’re having to work around them.

So, they could take you to a swamp. They could take you across a river. They could be up in the trees. They could be walking in the forest, strolling in the darkest areas. You’ve got no control whatsoever. So you literally have to document what they do. There’s no choice other than to just watch them all the time, follow them all the time, and from your knowledge and experience about where they might go, what they might do, and try to anticipate it and be in position. That’s one of the crucial things about wildlife filming, and that’s one of the reasons it takes so long – it takes a long time to learn the routine of the animals and to be able to predict what they’re going to do.

With primates, each individual is an individual within the group. You’ll have dominant males and subordinate males. You’ll have dominant females and subordinate females. You’ll have middle-ranking animals. All those dynamics are going on at the same time, so each monkey doesn’t do the same thing. You have to factor that in, knowing what the dominant male is likely to do next, or what is about to happen to an individual because of their lower ranking. Once you have all that knowledge, you’re more equipped to anticipate.

And of course, you don’t always get it the first time. Suddenly they’ll do something completely out of the blue that you couldn’t expect, and you then have to think “Okay, this was the situation, this is the context, this is what I need to do next time in order to get that.” With just about any other form of filmmaking, there’s a certain degree of control with light direction, with actors. We’ve got no control. That’s the challenge of it, but it’s also a slight frustration. When you get it right, and you capture stuff that hasn’t been captured before, that’s the reward.

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it takes a long time to learn the routine of the animals and to be able to predict what they’re going to do

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Monkey Kingdom

Polonnaruwa is a wonderful combination of wild forest and ancient ruins. It’s not the easiest place to work because it’s incredibly hot, and the humidity is very high. These monkeys are actually quite small. When you look at them on the screen, because we shoot them all from a very low angle, they look quite big, but they’re actually tiny. So, you’re constantly following relatively small animals through very dense vegetation, and they’re quite fast-moving. So, it’s very hot, tiring work, particularly in that humidity. You end up getting up very hot and sweaty very quickly.

We didn’t have any problems at all with the cameras.

It was remarkable. When you consider that we were in the middle of Sri Lanka and shooting and backing up an awful lot of data, the whole thing worked incredibly smoothly. When we did Chimpanzee, we had to put the cameras inside a box with silica gel every day to stop from getting moldy. The humidity wasn’t as high in Sri Lanka, so we didn’t go through that process, and they were absolutely fine. The cameras are processing a lot of data, so they do get very hot. We were sitting out in the sun, and they were sometimes too hot to touch, but we never 43

actually had a problem with them shutting down.

They were remarkably robust given the conditions.

I filmed quite a lot of the rain sequences, and it was simply a case of making sure the camera didn’t get wet by putting a Porta-Brace cover on it, or an umbrella over it, or plastic bags. We were able to film in torrential downpours without any problems at all, as long as we were sensible about the amount of water falling on the camera.

One of the obvious things about filming a primate that lives in the forest is that you’ve got extreme contrast. The difference between the highlights and the shadows is just huge. Having 14 stops of dynamic range is a massive help, and we knew that the noise levels in the shadows was very good and very low. The shadows were incredibly clean. As long as we didn’t leave anything at the top end, as long as we didn’t clip the top of the image, we were going to be fine. We could basically let that dynamic range handle the contrast.

We were shooting a time base of 24p, but in wildlife, we virtually never shoot at normal speed.

We overcrank it slightly, so we were nearly always

We didn’t have any problems at all with the cameras. It was remarkable. When you consider that we were in the middle of Sri Lanka and shooting and backing up an awful lot of data, the whole thing worked incredibly smoothly

shooting at 26, 28, 30 or 32 fps. That takes the frenetic edge off of the animals’ activity, particularly for the big screen. If you’re doing big close-ups of animals, they can move very quickly. We’re always just trying to take the edge off that frenetic activity, without making it look like slow motion. Slightly over cranking also gives them a bigger presence, if you like - it makes them more relatable.

Because animals in the wild are unpredictable, you need to be very, very fast. So you need a system where everything is literally at your fingertips, because things happen so quickly. You need to be able to focus, frame it correctly, and be shooting within seconds of something happening. One of the things that was fantastic on this camera was the 2x and 4x magnification. On the pan bar, we had a remote on/ off switch, and we also had a remote 2x/4x mag set up. So as we framed up on the individual, we could knock in 2x or 4x, make sure the eyes were sharp, then back out, and be filming within seconds. Having that speed of magnification was extremely useful, and I haven’t seen this on any other camera. With the unpredictability of animals, as well as the large sensor size and unbelievably shallow depth of field, you need

to be on the nail every time. Of course, every single shot where we used that magnification we turned over, but it was so fast in and out that it just became part of our routine.

I’ve used a number of super 35mm digital cinema cameras on other nature films but had found various issues. Many were not particularly robust or lacked key features but I’ve also had issues with noise or with patterns on the image when shooting in to the light which were introduced by the low pass filter. We shoot into the sun all the time of course so artifacts like these are can be a genuine problem with other cameras.

The layout on the F65 is remarkably simple and straightforward to use. It’s a very straightforward camera. The ergonomics are very nice, and the OLED viewfinder was another epiphany. When you’re dealing with fast-moving animals where the eyes have got to be in focus, and they’re running towards you, or running away from you, you’ve got to have a viewfinder that is so sharp in order to stand a chance of getting the focus. The OLED was fantastic. There’s no blur. There’s no smearing when you’re panning.

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Monkey Kingdom

The focus assist in the viewfinder is great. It’s a dial that goes from 0 to 100, and we all had it set in a slightly different way. I usually use it with very high peaking, but obviously you have to be careful because it then starts to alter the image in the viewfinder. We all had slightly different settings depending on the way that we each thought it looked best, and the way it snapped in and out of focus. That was absolutely critical.

All our exposures were done by eye down the viewfinder. We were eyeballing everything because it’s all about speed. Suddenly the monkey’s doing something over there. You need

It is definitely the best image quality film that I’ve ever worked on as a result of using the F65 camera – no doubt about it 45

to pan around, and you need to be able to expose it, frame it, and shoot it within less than a second.

So all the exposure was done by eye, and the viewfinder was crucial as far that was concerned.

I think the most we ever shot in a day was three 512GB cards, about 60 minutes. On average it was less than that. That basically means that you’re spending an awful lot of time not shooting.

Because these animals were so habituated, we shot a lot of material, and when it came to the post-production, the edit team had a lot of options because we’d shot so much stuff. With Chimpanzee, for instance, they were so difficult

to film that our storytelling ability was very limited because we had a very limited amount of material. But with the Polonnaruwa monkeys, we had this huge volume of material. That gave us great flexibility in post-production with how we could illustrate the story. The take-home fact is that we spent a phenomenal amount of time just observing, following, waiting for certain situations to occur, and of course, as the film production goes on, your shooting ratio improves. I mean, basically you’re shooting less and less because you’ve already got the basics. You’re trying to get the unusual towards the end of the production.

So, you’re shooting even less as a proportion to

the amount of time that you’re spending out in the field.

It was a fantastic project to work on. I was dedicated to it for a year and a half, bouncing back and forth on 11- or 12-week trips over that period. It was a great place, a great setting. I think the film is going to look fantastic – I know it looks fantastic. It is definitely the best image quality film that I’ve ever worked on as a result of using the F65 camera – no doubt about it. We had a great bunch of people, and I think we produced something that is pretty cool. At the end of the day, I just hope people like it.

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